Ask HN: I made a shitty little app. Whats the best way to host it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I made a shitty little app. Whats the best way to host it?

8 pointsnaithemilkman7 comments

So I made a really simple app that just displays a tagcloud of your last 100 tweets based on the username. I did this using Python/Django.

Now my question is, what is the easiest and cheapest way to make my application live? Given my objective is to learn how to deploy a site live, how/what should I do?

Google App Engine will probably be easiest and cheapest for this. But my problem with GAE is that it's got its own paradigm and I don't think I would be use GAE for my future 'serious' projects. So I'm not sure the I will be able to bring forward anything I've learnt by going down the GAE route.

Amazon AWS seems to be the most obvious choice but by golly, there's a lot to know and read to get something up and running. Gotta remember, I got zero sys admin experience.

Any free regular hosting services that anyone knows of?

Side question: Why isn't there a Heroku for Django out in the wild? Every service I've seen seems to be in beta? Smells like a $200m exit waiting to be unleashed.

If I'm truly scaling a project I usually go with AWS. Unfortunately this does mean setting up a load with regards to sys admin items, often including some form of load balancing if you're truly attempting to scale a site. For multiple django projects when starting and for considerable time I run them on webfaction. Webfaction while shared hosting is a pretty solid choice for django, is a reasonable deploying and you could likely follow some similar model when setting it up on Amazon.

Getting something up and running on Amazon EC2 is actually quite easy. Had zero sys admin experience as well, but managed to run a simple app on my free micro instance in less than a day.

Another popular option is Linode.

EDIT: There's also http://stable.io/, which is kind of similar to Djangy, but it's not ready yet so keep an eye out.

Slicehost or Linode. You get a basic, empty box, and Slicehost has some of the best documentation out there. Everything you do will be the "normal" way - so you don't need to deal with any heroku-style weirdness. Great way to learn.

For simple Django hosting, there's Djangy.com, but you have to be quick because they're discontinuing the service.

The HN discussion (and the Djangy post itself) about Djangy shutting down has some links to other similar services http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2269406

Djangy is going down in less than a month. Why recommend it?

In reference to the claimed $200M exit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com